Pulp Crime

by Jerry eBooks

  “Yes?” said Dorothy.

  “Well, you were standing at her room door last night. I just wondered.”

  They had reached Frances’ room now and Johnny opened the door. Dorothy saw the pile of newspapers on the floor and remembered at once what Frances had told her about collecting the Times and Tribune, to which Mrs. Davis had subscribed, then reading them when she got blue or jumpy, in what Frances called her “newspaper mood.” She recited this verbatim to Johnny.

  “The thing is then,” he said, “to check over the papers and see if the dates run consecutively, If one is missing, but the dates run on after the missing one, we’ll know which paper she had.”

  “Maybe,” Dorothy suggested, “she struggled with him when he tried to grab the paper, and the killing was half accidental.”

  He took the Times, and Dorothy took the Tribune. The papers were stacked neatly and it was a simple matter to run through them. The dates ran consecutively on each. There were no breaks, no papers missing. There were copies of True Story and one Mirror.

  Johnny rose wearily.

  “I know!” Dorothy said suddenly. “I know which it was! I asked her if the Times wasn’t just a little heavy. She said yes, but she had one copy of the Journal.”

  He snapped his fingers. “And the Journal isn’t here.”

  Dorothy was biting her lip. Suddenly she said: “She even told me what day. It was—ah—it was Thursday! Last Thursday’s Journal.”

  *****

  BY THE time the coroner finished with Frances’ corpse and it had been taken away, it was almost three o’clock. Johnny West detailed two detectives to remain inside the house, and left with the coroner, to report in at the station, and to procure a copy of the missing newspaper.

  Dorothy had come to depend on him and while he was gone she felt a little lost and afraid. She walked quietly about the house, very pale, and saying little. She noticed at four o’clock that a fresh wind was rushing in across the Sound, and the first noisy clatter of leaves, fluttering furiously against the branches of trees, startled her.

  When she went to the window the trees were leaning against the wind, the first few drops of rain spit against the glass pane, and the wind picked up more force and speed. Dorothy sat on the window sill. The rain vanished for a moment, though the clouds rolled closer. The butler was rushing about closing windows and securing the doors against the storm.

  She remained in her position, fascinated and chilled. Once there was the flash of lightning, but the blurring murk of rain erased it, and after that it was just rain, pounding, beating, rolling out of the skies.

  Mrs. O’Malley appeared, her eyes red from crying, and said: “Supper’s ready.”

  When Dorothy came to the table, Clifton was saying: “But you could get money to back my play, couldn’t you? I mean, since Mrs. Davis thought it was good enough to put on—.” He glanced to the end of the table at Betty. “Mrs. Smyth, if Tulley would produce my play, do you think you might be interested in making—”

  “She’s going to give her money to charity,” Wiggam reminded him.

  “Will you shut up?” Clifton snapped.

  Grant said: “Please don’t talk to my wife about money, old man. Things are strained enough.”

  “Is she going to come back to you?” Clifton asked, a hopeful light dawning in his eyes.

  “Please!” Dorothy pleaded.

  “All right, all right,” Clifton said. “Try and transact a little legitimate business and that’s what you get. It’s just a matter of time before the cops grab the guy that’s behind this and—”

  “What makes you think they’ll get him at all?” Grant asked quickly. “They usually do.”

  “Not always,” Wiggam said.

  “Don’t be so morbid,” Sam Tulley interrupted. “Are you trying to tell us we’re going to spend our lives out here waiting for West to make an arrest?”

  “I don’t think so,” said a voice. Dorothy looked up to see Johnny West come into the room. He shrugged off a wet slicker, and let it drop to the floor. “If a newspaper is so important a girl is murdered over it—well, it’s going to turn up the mystery in sweet order.”

  “Did you get it?” Dorothy asked. “No. Went to every store in Mamaroneck, Larchmont and New Rochelle. But I sent a man to the Journal office in New York. He’ll be back in an hour.”

  “It was Dorothy that turned up that angle and told you the name of the paper, wasn’t it?” Clifton said.

  “Yes.”

  Clifton looked at Wiggam and nodded toward West. “He’s recruited her. Somebody’s got to dope out police logic, and he’s trying to get her to take a permanent job sweeping his floors and doing his thinking.”

  Johnny flushed and looked at Dorothy.

  Sam Tulley, who had his coffee in front of him, bit the end off his cigar. “I think that’s sweet,” he said. “Romance under trying circumstances such as these.” He launched into a patter so trite it stood on the crutches of age. “Like I always say, love will find a way.” Tulley could not understand why Clifton and Wiggam laughed. Dorothy pushed back her chair and left the table. West was white.

  DOROTHY was in the study when Johnny West came in. She had taken a book from the shelf and was touching the dust with the tips of her fingers, but her hands trembled.

  “Maybe it is silly,” she said. She looked down at the book.

  His voice was husky. “Do you really think that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what to think. I want to come to you because you are protection, a haven. But maybe it was meant that whatever battles I have, I should fight them alone. I’m not like every other girl. There’s circus blood in me. A fever that was given to me by my mother that makes me want to go, go, go like a dynamo.”

  He touched her elbows. “Then there’s love which every woman must some day have. You forgot that.”

  Tears sprang into her eyes. “Did I, darling? Did I forget? It was stupid of me, wasn’t it?”

  She took his wrists and put his arms around her. “Hold me,” she said. “Hold me tight, Johnny, so I’ll know that it’s you. Not just an illusion.”

  In a moment, he said: “Then you’ve decided?”

  “Yes,” she answered. “Oh, yes, I have.”

  “You won’t change your mind? You won’t let that bitter-tongued maniac change you?”

  “Not ever, Johnny,” she said. “It’s you I want. Things that are good and true, not false glamour.”

  She heard sound and looked up suddenly to see one of the uniformed policemen at the door. He took off his hat.

  “Yes?” said West.

  “There’s someone on the front porch asking to come in, sir,” he said.

  “Who is it?”

  “A man and a woman and a cop from Michigan.”

  “From Michigan?”

  The policeman nodded. “They want to see Miss Noel. There’s a warrant and extradition papers. Shall I let them in, sir?”

  Dorothy sank into a chair. Her heart pounded like a hammer against her side.

  VII

  FOR a moment there was silence and Dorothy could hear the incessant pounding of rain. She felt as though she were being inexorably wrapped in the cold rain of night and that once it enclosed her there would be no escape.

  Johnny was saying: “I’ll go out and talk to them. Wait here, Dorothy.”

  She sat there numb and lifeless, thinking of all the things in her life, and how short and fleeting they were, a million tomorrows reaching out before her, ten thousand yesterdays behind.

  She saw Johnny when he came in. She was looking at the carpet and she saw his feet and the bottoms of his trousers. She was almost afraid to look.

  “They’re gone,” he said. “But they’ll be back. We’ll have to settle it some way. The cop’s papers aren’t in order as they stand. And this Myers is ridiculous to press the charge when he can’t possibly gain anything but hatred for himself if it hits a court. You’ll beat it easy. You could e
ven press a counter charge.”

  “He’s probably trying to scare me,” she said.

  He looked at his fingernails. “I don’t know. I wondered about that. This blonde dame kept trying to shut him up. She’d say: ‘Now, Hank . . . Now, Hank . . .’ and he’d look at her kind of funny, as if he didn’t know what to make of her. Who is she?”

  “Sherry Moore. My best friend. She met him when he came to my apartment looking for me.”

  “Oh. Well, she’s trying hard. But she isn’t doing much with him. It’s you the guy wants to see.”

  “What’s he going to do now?”

  “Stay in Mamaroneck till you can get out of here.”

  Dorothy said slowly: “I hate him.”

  West lifted his right eyebrow. “You’ve got something there.”

  The policeman appeared at the door again. He had a wet newspaper in his hand.

  “Last Thursday’s Journal,” he announced. “Somebody said you wanted it.”

  Johnny bolted from the chair. “Give it to me. And round up everybody. In the living room. We’re going to have a little session.”

  He unfolded the paper at once and began reading it. Dorothy saw that in his excitement he had completely forgotten her, and she got up and moved toward the kitchen to get a drink. But when she arrived in the servant’s hall she saw Grant and Betty and drew to a halt. The tall Englishman was bending over his wife, almost shouting so that she would hear every word.

  “It isn’t this beastly chauffeur you love. All he’s after is your money. Can’t you see that? You’ve humiliated me, but it isn’t that that hurts. Roy is—oh, dash it all—so obvious. Everyone can see it except you.”

  Dorothy was touched. Grant knew Betty, she decided, better than anyone did, because it was this kind of talk that she would most easily understand. Yet, she seemed to listen only through suffering tolerance.

  “Betty, old girl,” he pleaded. “Look at me.”

  She did. Her face was cold. “You didn’t tell me about your father dying,” she said. “You deceived me about that.”

  “I didn’t want to upset you!”

  “No,” she said, “you didn’t want me to know that you were poor. For a month I’ve missed money from my purse.”

  “I only took enough for cigarettes,” he said defensively.

  “The money doesn’t matter. You were underhanded about it, Grant.”

  “Damn it all!” he said. “You’ve got to come to your senses. This Roy—.” The back door slammed, and Roy appeared at the opposite end of the hall. Neither Betty nor Grant saw him. He watched them for a moment. There was both contempt and rage in his face. He moved forward rapidly, shoved Grant back.

  “Stay away from her.”

  GRANT SMYTH, his whole skinny body trembling, reached out and hit Roy across the mouth with his fist. Roy stepped back and stood there, breathing hard. Dorothy thought: “He’s treading soft ground now and he knows if he doesn’t hit Grant back he has Betty’s sympathy.”

  Betty slapped Grant across his cheek. Grant’s mouth gaped open. He put his finger tips to his cheek. Dorothy turned and fled.

  She came into the living room. Clifton was sitting in a straight chair.

  “Ah, Juliet,” he said.

  Wiggam was tapping a cigarette on his wrist. “Thought you hadn’t read Shakespeare?”

  “I haven’t,” said Clifton. “I saw Norma Shearer do Juliet in the movies.”

  Dorothy sat down, saying nothing. Sam Tulley had an open box of candy in his lap and he generously offered her a piece. She declined. Betty came in and sat down in a corner. Grant came after her and sat on the divan beside Dorothy. Roy appeared and leaned against the door jamb. Mrs. O’Malley arrived and stood beside Roy, fumbling with her apron.

  Johnny West’s entrance was dramatic. His face was flushed.

  “Get ready for the second act curtain,” Clifton said. “He looks as though he’s going to ring it down with a smash.”

  “Exactly,” West snapped. He folded the newspaper. “This is a copy of the same paper Frances had when she was killed. Someone in this room thought it was of sufficient importance to commit murder—He looked up. “Mrs. O’Malley, where’s your husband?”

  She shrugged. “I couldn’t find him. The cop’s looking now. He must be around somewhere. He wouldn’t go away and leave me here.”

  West nodded, glanced back at the paper. “I’ve been all through it. It is my notion that the item about which Frances was so excited was this one. I’ll read it, or enough of it to give all of you the general idea. The caption is, ‘Pair of Socks Kills Man—Five Others in Metropolitan Area 111—Strong Dye Turns Victim Blue’.” West paused. Then he went on: “ ‘Homer Certiff, ten forty-four Marianne Street, Bronx, died in his home today after having been stricken with poisonous aniline dye that was found to have been in the stockings he wore. The socks, the brand of which is as yet unknown, were a bright blue, a coloring given them through a rinse in the chromium fluoride of a cheap dye. The theory was offered that Certiff had done considerable walking and that the dye entered his system through the pores of the skin on his feet, being absorbed as his feet sweated. His body turned a faint blue and he died shortly after the arrival of a doctor. Had Certiff not been in poor health it was said that the extra strain the dye put on his heart probably would not have proved fatal. Police report that five other men in the metropolitan area have suffered similar attacks, though none of them is serious. Investigation is now under way to trace the source of the stockings.’ ”

  West put the paper on the table. There was no sound. He glanced from face to face.

  “This was the base of the killer’s idea,” he said. “I have already checked with the medical examiner about the clipping, so we are certain of it. The murderer—one of you here now—read that and deduced that chromium poisoning could be absorbed through sweating feet and was deadly enough to kill. To obtain chromium fluoride without the coloring of a dye, and mixed in a formula several times stronger than the amount of chromium that would be used in a dye, would produce the desired death without the trace of body coloring. The killer knew that the poison would be found in the system if there was an autopsy, but because it had been absorbed through sweating feet, he knew also that there was a fifty-fifty chance it would not be detected.

  “Furthermore, he thought it even possible Mrs. Davis’ death would be attributed to acute indigestion, a weak heart, or one or a number of other natural reasons. It seemed a method of murder which would defy detection. It was Mrs. Davis herself who suggested murder. Her doctor and the coroner later confirmed this suspicion and an autopsy was performed. But the autopsy did not disclose that she had absorbed the deadly solution of chromium through her feet.”

  “Proving what?” said Clifton, his mouth contemptuous.

  WEST paid no attention to him. “The killer, obviously, didn’t want it known that he had poisoned Mrs. Davis through the low-heeled walking shoes. They were her favorites and he or she knew that sooner or later Mrs. Davis would wear them.” He glanced from Betty to Grant, and then at Mrs. O’Malley. “The killer also knew that the death would be a slow one, and because there was no coloring or stomach indication of poison, a diagnosis would be next to impossible while she lived.”

  He perched himself on the edge of the table, his face still very white.

  “However, the reason the murderer didn’t want it known the poison had come from the shoes—whose lining he had removed and soaked in chromium fluoride and then sewed back in—was that he was aware the shoes could be traced directly to him. He knew that once it was out that the shoes had killed Mrs. Davis, his hours of freedom were numbered.

  “That’s the reason he—or she—stole the shoes from the death room immediately after Mrs. Davis died, or perhaps while she was dying and to avoid being seen in the hall with them, left them in Miss Noel’s room, which he was able to reach by way of the balcony. That is also the reason he returned to Miss Noel’s room Tuesday night. To get the sho
es. He thought that Miss Noel was asleep and she would never know anyone had been in the room. When she screamed he silenced her, took the shoes, and escaped.

  “But even without the evidence of the shoes in the lining of which the poison could be found, the newspaper item was in itself sufficiently incriminating, so that when Frances ran up the stairs in search of me to show it to me, knowing I had asked about shoes, he stopped her. There was a struggle, and he choked Frances and pushed her through the banister. The murderer couldn’t dream that, once he had burned the newspaper, we’d ever be able to discover which it was. But he lost again.

  “We’re close now. This thing’s winding up. And I’ve got some questions. You first, Betty—ah, Mrs. Smyth. You don’t remember anything at all about those shoes?”

  “Well, I—I don’t know.”

  “You, Grant?”

  “I say, you mean the same ones I found in my closet Monday, wrapped up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course,” Grant replied. “I do jolly well know about them. Rhea gave them to me to have fixed. I took them to the cobbler myself. When I found them I naturally concluded that the cobbler had returned them and Frances had put them in my room by mistake.”

  “On what day did you take them to the cobbler?”

  Grant scratched his head, his mouth open. “Let’s see. Oh, yes, it was the day I had that argument about the penny, on—ah—”

  “Thursday?”

  “By Jove, you’re right.”

  “I see. Do you remember what occasioned Mrs. Davis’ sending the shoes to be fixed? Are you certain it was she who asked you to do it?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Grant. “The old girl was furious. She had broken her heel and almost stumbled down the stairs.” West pondered that a moment. “Then we must find the cobbler. Tonight. Find who got the shoes out.”